Finally, Britain has a space for legal drug consumption – thanks to one man’s civil disobedience | Kojo Koram

TThis week the city of Glasgow opened the first legal drug consumption area in Britain. Users of the Thistle can inject medications in a safe and clean environment under the watchful eye of qualified healthcare professionals. Evidence shows that this practice reduces drug deaths and the spread of infectious diseases. And while it may sound like a scary new idea to British ears, you can find these rooms in cities from Vancouver to Sydney; in fact, the first such room opened way back in 1986 in Bern, Switzerland.

Since the early 2000s, experts have been calling for safe consumption spaces to be set up in the UK’s drug hotspots. But attempts to introduce this vital harm reduction service have been frustrated for years, even in Scotland – once the “drug death capital of the world”. While the focus this week will understandably fall on the medical professionals and municipal authorities responsible for getting the Thistle off the ground, it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on the fact that none of this would likely be would have happened if one member had not been there. of that demonized population, the drug users, a few years ago.

In 2020, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, former heroin user and drug intervention worker Peter Krykant realized that if support services closed their doors due to lockdown, Glasgow’s drug user population would die in even greater numbers unless someone did something. Krykant knew that too, he said global evidencewas the most effective way to reduce deaths from dangerous drugs, giving people a place to use drugs in a safe environment. This is because much of the danger from drugs comes from sharing needles, injecting in dirty alleys, or injecting repeatedly into damaged veins. Safe consumption areas mean that people at least use drugs in a supervised and hygienic environment.

Krykant converted an old minivan into a makeshift safe consumption space and loaded it with clean syringes, bottled water and naloxone kits (the life-saving drug that can reverse an opioid overdose). Krykant kept watch in his van, which he later converted into a converted ambulance almost 900 injections of local drug users, who treated nine overdoses in the vehicle. This risky act of direct action has taken a personal tollhe told me, about his family relationships and his own sobriety. And it almost cost him his freedom: in October 2020, he was charged with obstructing police who wanted to search his van. The charges were eventually dropped public pressure.

“It took someone who ruined their lives for them (politicians) to say they could do something about it (the drug crisis), and that person was me,” Krykant told me when I asked him what he thought about the safe consumption space . His safe consumption car not only saved lives, but also increased pressure on the Scottish government. In 2023, the Lord Advocate, Scotland’s chief legal adviser, said: announced that it would not be in the public interest to prosecute people using safe consumption spaces, opening the legal door for what would become the Distel. Krykant’s protest had been successful. But it came at great personal sacrifice.

“I’m not in a good place right now,” he said. “And it all stems from the moment I made the decision to drive that van.”

It is fortunate that from this week some of Glasgow’s most vulnerable residents will have access to a facility that could save their lives and give them a chance to get better. If all goes well, it could inspire other British cities struggling with dangerous drug deaths to push the government to launch their own plans. But as is often the case with direct action, it is the brave souls who are willing to be the first to pass through the breach and are pelted with all the arrows.

We have known what works for almost 40 years. Until this week, there were more than 100 safe consumption spaces in the world, but not in the city that arguably needed them most. Why? Ultimately because politicians in Scotland and the rest of Britain were too afraid of bad headlines to take the necessary action. But Peter Krykant was not. As he works on his own recovery behind the scenes, it is important that we remember that the road to change is not always paved with patient lobbying in Parliament. Sometimes a little civil disobedience goes a long way.

• Kojo Koram teaches at Birkbeck School of Law, University of London, and writes on issues of law, race and empire